390: Pulling the Pin with Steven Pressfield
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Hey guys, it's me, Mike Rowe, and episode 390. Is that right, Chuck? 390? 390, yeah. Look at us go, man. So like 10 away from 400, if I'm doing the math right. I think you nailed it. Okay. This one is called Pulling the Pin, and my guest is Steven Pressfield. Well, we love him, but we're not alone. This guy is, well, he's certainly a legend in the publishing world, and he's become a kind of Svengali, I think, for a lot of writers. Yeah.

The only other writer I know who has paid as much dues as him or more as my mom. Right, right. Yeah, she's putting the hours for sure. Stephen has written, I mean, if you know him, it could be from Turning Pro or The Artist's Journey or The Tides of War or The Legend of Bagger Vance. Remember the movie with Matt Damon? He wrote that book upon which the movie was based. Talk about paying your dues. I think he's 80, 81 years old at this point.

He's worked in advertising. He was a truck driver. Oh, and an orchard worker. Yeah, picked fruit. Yeah. Dozens of dirty jobs. He kind of came over the transom as a result of a relationship with Scott Mann. These two guys know each other. And of course, you know Scott if you listen to the podcast. Former Green Beret, who wrote some books himself.

We just had a great conversation with this guy. He's a big thinker. He's been there and he's done that. His new memoir is called Government Cheese and it's terrific. But his old stuff, if you haven't read The War of Art...

It's just great. You know, if we were Venn diagrams, vis-a-vis our worldviews, certainly micro works and the sweat pledge would sit comfortably atop or beneath his notion of work. What's his exact quote?

Well, he says talent is bullshit and work is everything. So he places very little on talent. I mean, talent's a great thing to have, but without work, it could be easily wasted. Yeah. In the end, the guy does not discourage people.

I mean, he challenges people by being blisteringly honest with regard to what I think he would agree is a no shortcut philosophy to writing. Right. There's just no shortcuts. Yeah. As my pop used to say, shortcuts lead to long delays. Well...

He's certainly on that page, but he is living proof that delayed gratification pays off and that hard work pays off. He's got a wonderful sense of humor, and he is just about the work. He writes every day. Yeah. Every day. He's a true journeyman.

In the world and in the craft and you don't have to be a writer to benefit hugely from what you're about to hear His books are a kind of survival guide. Yes. Yes. Yes, right Yeah, that's what the war of art is. I think yeah for sure and by the way It's not a survival guide written by a 44 year old smart aleck with an MBA who thinks he's been there and done it this guy really has been there and

And he really has done it. And you're really going to love him. Steven Pressfield is his name. Pulling the pin is what we call this episode. And it all gets started right after this. So at the end of this commercial for Zip Recruiter, Chuck and I are going to sing another completely original and entirely unsolicited jingle. Not to belabor the point, but Zip Recruiter did not ask for this. I took the initiative. That's right, the initiative.

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I have some good news, guys. I'm rolling. We're rolling. We're ready to go. Thank God. You can just proceed with all due speed and zero caution. So if everything we've said so far, Stephen, has been C plus, B minus material, this is where we up it into B plus, A minus. Okay. All right. And then eventually you get to A plus. I'm looking to you, Micah. But we don't want to peak too early. Okay.

Because we're going to be here for like, you got an hour, 15, hour, 20 minutes or so. Definitely. I have nothing for the whole rest of the day. Oh yeah. Chuck, settle in brother. We're going to break some records. Keep in mind, we've got somebody else lying down. I know, I know. But whoever it is, it can't be as interesting as you, Steven. You've walked the earth now for some time. Would it be rude if I asked, uh,

My age? Yes. I'm going to be 81 in September. Wow. So amazing. As I mentioned, part of the reason I was so eager to talk to you is my mom listens to this podcast. She's 86. And I can't tell you how familiar she is with your body of work, but I can tell you that she wrote every day for 60 years before she got published.

And so much of what you've written in the past talks about work ethic and diligence and process and patience and delayed gratification. And for all those reasons, I just wanted to pick your brain and say thanks for sending me your latest, Government Cheese. - Yes. - First of all, where's the title come from? - This is about my, or a big part of the book is about my term as over the road trucker back in my 20s.

And one of the loads that we used to deliver was, this is the days before food stamps, when the government would give surplus food to certain communities. And it all went out, usually where I was going, it went to churches. And this was a load that we used to deliver to various churches on the coast of North Carolina. And I go into great detail about what it was like to do that, but I always felt that it was...

really doing something good for people. You know, we really felt like you were actually people, you know, you would pull in, you'd park the truck in the churchyard. People would come in for hours, take their stuff and go home. But then beyond that, I sort of came to view writing as like that, that you're there, you, the writer are there to deliver a load of

And the load is, you know, whatever you bring to the table, whatever your gift is. But the thing about those deliveries to churches is they, for whatever reason, I never really knew why, the minister, you know, would welcome you, blah, blah, blah. And then they would sort of shunt you off to the side. And you never interacted with anybody there. So you were anonymous. Writing is a lot like that. I mean, maybe if you're Hemingway or something like that, people will buy a book because of that. But basically...

You sort of step aside, and it's the load that counts. It's what you're delivering to people. So that's the metaphor of the book, and that's why government cheese was a big thing. You know, you have the big boxes of cheese. So that's the metaphor of the book. It's terrific. It reminds me of, you remember Tim O'Brien?

Remind me? He wrote a book called The Things We Carry. Oh, yeah, yeah. Tim's great. Best book out of the Vietnam War, yeah. Yep, I thought so too. I like She-Hands too, A Bright and Shining Lie. Ah, yeah, that was good too. It was pretty great. But O'Brien just snuck up on you with those metaphors. And I was just thinking of him this morning. I went for a long walk, as I try to do every morning. But when I'm home, I take a 40-pound ruck.

Right? Because I don't have to walk as far to get the same effect. But I think, man, it's just extraordinary. Like the weight of the iron in your pack, the weight of the cheese in the truck, the weight of the ideas in your mind, and your ability to somehow get all of that to your audience. It is an amazing metaphor. Why'd you wait 80 years to use it? Yeah.

And I don't know, but the other sort of interesting thing about delivering a load to churchyards and stuff like that was it was a great feeling when the truck was empty. And I know you can relate to this. You come in, it's full. You leave, it's empty. You know, you sweep out all the little shavings and stuff like that. And you really feel like I've delivered something here. You know, I didn't make it. You know, I didn't make this food, these, you know, but I delivered it. So...

That was the metaphor for that. Not to get too pedantic about it, but what kind of cheese was it? Do you recall? You know, I think it was, I really don't know. I guess it was American cheese, you know, because it came in the big boxes, you know. Like wheels, like a nice sensible cheddar. No, I think it was just squares, you know, big blocks, like square blocks. You never got one as a kid to...

We must have been poorer than you guys. We weren't on food stamps, Chuck. No. I don't think we were on food stamps either, but I do remember getting a big block of cheese. Maybe it fell off a truck. I don't know. You know, it's amazing how many people I've run into since the book came out that tell me, yeah, my family got that stuff too. I remember that. I think they should bring it back. I don't know. They must do it somewhere instead of food stamps or whatever that SNAP program is. Yeah.

Well, James Earl Jones tells a story. When he was a boy living in Michigan, a truck delivered fresh fruit. Like they had a scurvy problem up there, like rickets and that kind of thing. A government truck? Yes, a government truck filled with fruit, grapefruit. Wow. He wrote a poem called Ode to a Grapefruit when he was a boy.

And so, yeah, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the contents of government trucks. These were private trucks, by the way. These were private? Yeah. It was a regular trucking company that did other stuff as well. Yeah.

But it's government cheese. This was one contract, yeah. They had this one contract with the state of North Carolina. But on the subject of Tim O'Brien, just for a second, a book I'm working on now is a book where I sort of pick 36 great books that you should read if you're a young lieutenant,

at West Point or wherever it is. And the one book that I picked from the Vietnam War is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carry. So if he should happen to be listening to this show or watching it, I salute him for that. Matterhorn, another great one coming out of there. I didn't have enough room for that one. So this current project is going to essentially be your picks, 36 picks. Yeah.

But for whom exactly? Well, you know, I don't even know where this idea originally came from, but it would be for something like West Point cadets or young, you know, Marine officer candidates at the basic school. But also for anybody that's like in the corporate world or an entrepreneur or anything like that, it is trying to, you know, it's sort of like,

the canon, you know, in a way of what you, stuff you've got to read, you've got to know if you want to advance yourself. The essentials. In any kind of way, yeah, the essentials. But for me, since I'm not, I mean, I've written a bunch of books that are kind of military themed books, as you know, a lot of them set in the ancient world, but

But by no means am I like a classical scholar. It's like I've sort of drilled down in a few little quirky spots. So I know a lot about a few little quirky things and not about a lot of other stuff. So this is sort of my quirky collection of what, like one of the books I have in there, I don't know if this is even what you want to talk about. This is it. You're reading my mind. It's a book called The Memoirs of Baron de Marbeau.

which nobody's ever heard of, I'm sure. But he was a hussar, you know, cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars. And he wrote this long, this really long, thick thing of just this crazy adventures that they had fighting, you know, everywhere. Austerlitz, he was everywhere. So that's a book that like nobody would put on their list. You know, this is not going to be on the commandant's list or anything, you know, at West Point that you have to read, but it's a great, great book. Why? Why is it on this list?

just because it was so much fun to read and also because I wanted over the course of these books to hit the subject of war from every angle possible. Like the first book here is the Iliad. Mm-hmm.

So it starts kind of serious. And Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, blah, blah. And there's a lot of books that are like, war is hell. This is, you know, that kind of thing. But for Baron de Marbeau, war was a crazy swashbuckling adventure. Oh, this reminds me of Frasier. And yeah. George MacDonald Frasier, The Flashman Chronicles, that stuff? Yeah. He did, I thought, for historical fiction. He just made it accessible for me anyway. Yeah.

That Flashman series, all 15 of them, I learned more about Lucknow and Kanpur and the Victorian age. I love those books. They take you to another place that you would never know anything about. Time machines. Yeah, yeah. I think Stephen King described books as that, as time machines. I mean, I kind of feel that way about when I do something that's historical in the sense that I'm not reading about it, I'm like inventing it.

or imagining myself back into it. And a lot of times you don't really know you're making this shit up a lot of the time. That's a bad way of putting it. The right way of putting it, I think, is you're imagining yourself into a world and bringing what you know about men in groups, that sort of stuff, and projecting it into another era. I heard you once, let me see if I remember it right,

I am a soldier. It's the only life I've ever known. Ah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. First two lines of... That was the start of The Virtues of War about Alexander the Great. Right. And you did not know what that book was going to be about. I've read this stuff. You did not know. But you knew that those two lines hummed and throbbed and had to be on the page. So you write them down.

I'm only bringing this up because you parenthetically moments ago said I don't know where the ideas come from But I would like to understand where the ideas come from. Well, let me give you the full story of that is the subject I'm really passionate about two sentences popped into my head from nowhere, right? I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life and when they came to my head I thought I knew these were the first two lines of a book and

coming from the muse, coming from wherever. But I didn't know who was saying them or what this book was about, you know? And I sort of sat with it for months. And then one day, I just, it also popped into my head, this is Alexander the Great.

And so I thought, oh, shit. I mean, if I'm going to write this book, I have to write in the first person as Alexander the Great? How does it pop into your head, Stephen? What do you mean it pops into your head? I mean, how does anything pop into your head, you know, when you're in the shower or something? I mean, it's sort of like you've heard a million stories I know of like

Somebody like Tom Waits is a famous story of driving down the freeway and some song that was one of his hits popped into his head, you know, complete, start to finish, and he had to, like, screech off to the side of the freeway and write it all down before it went away. Steven Tyler says he woke up so agitated one morning and wrote Dream On. Ah. Aerosmith, start to finish in real time, came to him fully formed. I absolutely believe it. I mean, I've heard Bob Dylan say that he doesn't even remember anything

writing the songs that he wrote. But this is a really deep subject of where do ideas come from, you know? And where do your mother's ideas come from, those 50 stories, you know? How did she know to do that? But I've certainly found that the next book will sort of come to me

From the goddess, you know, from another dimension of reality. And I know Roseanne Cash says a writer or songwriter has to have a catcher's mitt to catch that idea that comes along before it winds up in Lucinda Williams' repertoire. Composed? Yeah, composed. Great book. Yeah. Yeah.

Anybody that's listening, Roseanne Cash's great autobiography or memoir composed. Did she, I hope I'm remembering it right, but didn't she have a nightmare of sorts? She had a dream, a famous dream that I've quoted like about 15 times.

Do you want me to tell you that? I do. I do because I had one of the most disturbing dreams of my life. God, very disturbing. And I'm, no, I'm not going to share it. No, no, I'm not. I'm not. It's a click beyond dark. And what I'll tell you about the dream was, um,

Sometimes in my dreams, I see the world that I'm in, but I don't see myself in the dream. I know it's me. It's my point of view, internalized, looking out. This dream was shot through a lens.

a camera that somebody else was holding and I was a key figure in it doing horrible things. So you're watching yourself. Watching myself. Right. Was this recent? It was very recent. It was, I think maybe the night before last. Yeah. Yeah. You know, for what it's worth, Mike, I've found my own dreams that I say this to you now, uh,

A lot of times, dreams that seem to be nightmares, that seem to be some dark, dark place, once you analyze them, are actually positive. So don't be too freaked out by that. It's going to be tough. Take it too literally. I'm going to need a couple days on this one. This was bad. A couple days. This was bad. This was bad. Okay. But Roseanne's dream. Okay. Here's the dream. And this is in her book, Composed. Composed.

At that time, she was making a record called King's Record Shop that four number one singles came out of. But she always felt, or she hadn't quite acknowledged to herself, that she wasn't doing what she really wanted to do. She really wanted to be a songwriter, really wanted to write the material, and instead she was singing other people's material. So she had this dream, and in the dream, one of her idols was Linda Ronstadt.

So in the dream, she's at a party and Linda Ronstadt is sitting. There's an older man who somehow she knew his name was Art in the dream. Linda Ronstadt's sitting on one side of Art and she, Roseanne, is sitting on the other. And Art is engaged in a deep conversation with Linda and barely, you know, noticing Roseanne. And one time Roseanne sort of pokes him, you know, or tries to get his attention. And he just turns to her with a withering glance and says, we have no respect for dilettantes.

And she said, I woke up from that dream shaken to the core. And she sort of realized, I am a dilettante. My dream is to write my own material and to make records that are real theme records, and I haven't done it. And so she says in the book, from that moment on, she changed her life.

She started jogging. She started taking classes in music and in art so that she could work with material that wasn't music related. She worked on her stamina. She started studying with real voice teachers. And she worked on, like she said, I always had a bad habit of drifting off into daydreams.

And she said, I sort of taught myself to pull myself back and to really focus on doing what I really want to do, which was write the material. And the quote at the end of this chapter is something like, let's see if I can get this right. She talked about how everything had become kind of scary and new in the studio. And she said, I had awakened from the morphine...

of success into the life of an artist. And so that, to me, that whole story was so great. It's a moment where your life changes, where you go from being kind of a bit of an amateur, even though she had tremendous success, to a real pro. But the other great part of it was that the mentor in the dream was her own self. The dream was her mentor.

that this came out of something inside of her. It wasn't Obi-Wan Kenobi showing up and telling her something. It was her. No, it's a character named Art. So she's clearly assigned a name. Yeah. Did she say what Art looked like? Just that he was an older guy. So I guess, you know, a mentor type figure. Yeah. So this is all in composed, her memoir, which is great. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dum.

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It's just like this talisman that's with you, taunting you, reminding you that you're supposed to be using it while you're doing all of these other jobs, which I got to get into as well. But my point is, when you describe what it takes to write a novel, a book, on a typewriter like that, I think there are very few living writers today who know what you're talking about. But I think of Hemingway.

And the violence...

I mean, it's hard work, the clack and the smack and the bell and the, I mean, this is a 21, 22 pound albatross around your neck that you carried. Riff on that if you want. Yeah, nobody knows what, and if you think about it, you've got to use your left pinky to hit certain keys, you know? That's hard to push down hard. You've got to make that thing. And nobody knows what even a typewriter is these days. But the longer sort of version of that story was that when I was like 22 or so, I tried to write a novel about,

I had no business tackling anything like that. And it became a disaster, broke up my marriage, blah, blah, blah. The novel did. The novel did, or the fact that I quit on it at the end. So I wound up sort of on the road doing a lot of the dirty jobs that you talk about a lot. But I kept this typewriter that I had worked with, with me. I was living in my van, my 65 Chevy van. Down by the river? Down by the river. But I never...

I never touched it. It was like such an object of shame to me. It was like, you know, this is where you really fucked up. But you toted it around with you. Yeah, I know. You couldn't put your shame down. I just, maybe on some level, I knew one day I'm going to bring this, you know, fucker out and do something with it, you know?

So interesting. Yeah. If you had written a fictional version of that, of a writer trying to find himself, you know, you would give him a typewriter to carry around with him for that one, you know, like having a gun because, you know, someday you're going to shoot it. Okay. I'm a good interviewer. I'm not a great one. And the reason I'm not a great one is that it's,

I'm not getting the information from you that you just reminded me of that I should be getting. You're 22. You decide to write a novel. But that means you were doing something else for money at 22. Yeah. I was working in advertising in New York City. I'd love this. And I had a boss. His name was Ed Hannibal. You can Google him. And one day he wrote a novel. He was like 30. And it was a hit.

And so I thought, I'll do that. How hard could it be? The firm can do it. Yeah. Yeah. So like 30 years later, you know, I finally did get a novel published. Advertising for whom? For Benton and Bowles in New York. Wow. So that was... I was like the junior, junior copywriter in this one group that Ed Hannibal was the boss of. This must have been early 60s, mid 60s? Yeah, like 66, something like that. Yeah, 66. So tail end of Mad Men?

Yeah, past Mad Men. I mean, Mad Men was like another era prior to, yeah. Well, what was that like, writing copy for the filthy lucra? Yeah, I was making like $110 a week. I think that was the most I ever made, yeah. Actually, it was a great education. You know, like with a 60-second commercial or 30-second, let's say a 30-second radio commercial can only be 60 words.

So there were a lot of those moments where you would write something, you'd bring it into your boss and he would say, cut this, you know, and send you back. It was like working for a newspaper where you, they kind of teach you what's the important stuff. That was a great, you know, lesson among other things that you learned there. Yeah. Look, I can talk about advertising. Have you worked in that biz? Yeah, I have. As what? As a writer? Sure.

Well, yes, I've never worked for an agency directly, but I've been hired by a lot of them. I probably did... Oh, God. Ah, the booze. Yeah. I hesitate to confess. Well, sure. Look, I mean, in the end, all things are marketing. All things are advertising. I mean, I'm about to advertise Government Cheese, a memoir by Steven Pressfield right now. I'm here advertising it and everything else. Absolutely. So I've always been suspicious about arbitraging the...

the commerce completely out of the transaction. It's always there. It's a bit more self-evident in advertising, maybe more so in film than it is in writing novels and so forth. But my first steady job

On TV was selling things on the QVC cable shopping. Oh, really? In the middle of the night. Like the absolute. How did you get into that thing? Well, I lost a bet. Well, no, you actually won a bet. Well, I won it. Yeah. I was singing in the opera at the time. And listeners here know the story, but I was in a bar during the intermission of an opera.

dressed as a Viking, drinking a beer, hoping to see a football game. But there was a big guy in a shiny suit selling pots and pans, and QVC was auditioning for people. So I went and crashed the audition the next day and got hired. But even before then, commercial work was the first thing I was able to book.

And since then, I've worked for Ford and Caterpillar. And, you know, it's funny. I get people ask me about the idea of selling out, you know. And I say, well, yeah, sure. I sold out before I had anything to bargain with, really. But everybody's path is super different. And I don't know what success is.

looks like for you, but I do get the sense that you really stopped giving a damn about the opinions of others somewhere along the way. Yeah. And that's very hard to do in advertising. True. I mean, it's impossible to do in advertising. Right. But you're right. It's so true that...

To write a book is one thing, but then you got to sell it. And I have certainly many times not sold it and watch things go into the toilet. And there's no worse feeling than that. Then, you know, you put in two, three years in your heart and soul into something and nobody even knows it exists. You know, they don't even know it exists. It's one thing if they hate it, that's one thing. That's good. At least they know it exists. So, and I'm like most artists, you know,

and I'll call myself that, I really don't like to flog my own stuff. It's really hard to get out there. You want a third party to do that. You're concentrating on the show and not the business aspect. But you've got to do it. You've got to do both. You've got to do it, and it's been a real change for me to get out and actually try to sell that sort of stuff. I have a blog, and we've never had ads on it. I never will have ads on it.

And I guess I'm old enough that I don't give a shit. You don't care. You know? You don't care. I hope I didn't gloss over that. But you, you pay, is paying your dues a metaphor that resonates with you? Oh, definitely, yeah. So for 27 years, I mean, you carried the typewriter for a long time. But, I mean, all of the jobs that had nothing to do with writing,

and yet I would imagine somehow inform your work today. That's why I can't wait to actually read this slowly and properly because you wrote it at a time in your life where it's clear you actually have something to say. And if I see one more memoir by a 38-year-old, what could they possibly know?

What did anybody know with that? I mean, some people at 38 know something, but, you know, I don't know if I know anything now, even at this advanced age. That's what makes us know you actually do. You have some humility about it. I did see a guy on the freeway one time, a fat old guy with a big cigar driving along a big, long Cadillac, and his license plate said, dues paid. Nice.

When did you feel like that applied to you? Only recently, you know, not very long ago. I think when I wrote Government Cheese, which was like two years ago or something like that. Was it hard to write? It was hard to start to write. Like my girlfriend, Diana, she said, you know, you've got so many stories about this and that that would be really interesting to people. You should tell them. And I thought...

who wants to hear anybody's, you know, bogus stories of, you know, but so little by little, she sort of wore me down and I sort of thought, you know, there is actually a theme here. It's really about something. It actually will, you know, be useful to people, I hope. So I just sort of, it was really hard to start. Once I started, it was kind of fun. People who have read my books, particularly The War of Art,

and its cousins have a vague idea of the odyssey of a particular solitary guy racked by guilt and riven by self-doubt as he struggles toward his destiny as a writer. But they have only the scantest conception of the particulars of that journey. These particulars, I'm hoping, may be of use to others as they wrestle with their own version of that same odyssey.

So let me try and strip it down. Let me tell you the parts I normally leave out. So, I mean, look, that's what your fans are slobbering for. That's what they're desperate to hear at this point. Well, I know when I talk to somebody like you about your, how did you get to QVC or how did you get into amateur...

People always do leave out those sort of, what was the connective tissue? You know, you left home and then you were a merchant marine in Zambolanga. How did that happen, you know? And it's always interesting because when I ask that, I'm trying to figure out how can I get from A to C? So I'd really love to know. Like sometimes people, I talk about, you know, I'm driving trucks and I'm all fucked up, blah, blah, blah. But I have an agent. And people say, well, how did you have an agent when you're, you know, and then, but it's interesting to...

To tell that story, you know, to know what the connective tissue is. By the way, I know Sterling Lord, right? Yeah, this is actually another one. It was before Sterling Lord, yeah. But you know Sterling? I certainly know. Well, you mentioned On the Road earlier. If I remember right, he had Jack Kerouac. Yeah, he did, yeah. He got, I think the story was 1948 or something, that the offer for On the Road was $900, and he got it up to $1,000.

So there you have it. This guy was, I mean, a legend. And I think he died a couple years ago. Yeah, he died at 102. 102. And he actually made two deals for me when he was 100. Get out. You're kidding. Yeah. And he was just a great guy all the way around. Yeah. Well, you know, they were deals. I was lucky. I was lucky to get a deal at all. Well, they were deals. Well, they were deals.

You know, Sterling at 100, he had to get around. He had a person helping him to get around, a lady. And he would come to a lunch in like a van, like one of the assisted living type vans. But he was there. You know, he had on a suit and a tie and was doing his thing. You knew everybody, right? He did, yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Okay, so 22, advertising, you realize you hate that. You're married. You want to write a novel. You start that. Doesn't go well. Divorced.

Marines at some point, right? Yeah, before that, you know, the reserves. Uh-huh. So no combat. No, no combat. And yet, this trope of war, and there's so much military. I mean, just in the last 20 minutes we've been talking, there are so many references in the language. In fact, the big book, I guess it was 2002, The War...

That's still the thing. I know you must be sick of talking about it, but is that when all of the thinking sort of came together? You mentioned the muse. I know you also talk about the resistance, these externalities, but they're, they constantly seem to be at war with each other. Well, to me, uh, life is a war, right? And I think, and the reason actually it's my partner, Sean Coyne, who came up with the title, the war of art. I called it something else, but, uh,

That's reality, I think, for me as a writer. There's a war of art and the war is inside your head and you are the enemy. And nobody will succeed as an artist until they learn, in my opinion, to overcome that compulsion to sabotage one's own self.

that I call resistance with a capital R. And that's what the War of Art was about in 2002. And it really was just sort of a distillation of what I thought was only in my own head, but which I realize is in everybody's head. That tendency of to be distracted, of self-doubt, of fear, of perfectionism, procrastination, all of those things that stop us from

from like your mom, God bless her, for 60 years she wrote every day. But there are 10 million artists out there and writers out there who write once a month if they do that. So the reason they don't do it is that negative force in their heads. And in my head too. Language is powerful, but metaphors are super powerful. Because it's images. Like what you just described, resistance is an enemy.

The muse is our friend. Maybe that's the place where the ideas come from and the resistance is the thing. In my opinion, it is, yes. So is the resistance at war with the muse or are you at war with your keyboard? Or is this just all another way to think about work ethic? Well...

One analogy that I always use is if you think about a tree in the middle of a sunny meadow, as soon as the tree appears, a shadow appears, right? Instantly, a shadow appears. The tree is the dream, is the novel you want to write, the podcast you want to start, the show you want to do, the business, whatever it is.

The shadow is resistance. And it's like an equal and opposite, like Newton's third law of motion or whatever that is, that an equal and opposite reaction. So that as soon as we have, as a dream appears to us, some creative thing we want to do, an equal and opposite force appears to stop us from doing this. What I call resistance.

So the muse is giving us an idea and then this negative force that is trying to stop us from acting out and doing it. This thing was kicking my ass for years before I even knew it existed. And when I finally sort of gave it a name in my own head and gave it the respect that

that it deserves as this force that must be defeated, that you have to confront. That was when I turned the corner at least enough to be able to sit down and try. Not to succeed, that would be a long ways in the future, but at least I was able then to sit down and try once I gave it a name in my own head. When did you feel like you knew you could write? Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dum!

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30 years of trying afterwards. 30 years. I mean, I... So you felt like that, going back to the dream, like Roseanne's dream, it's a classic imposter dream.

Every actor I've known has them, every writer, every musician. It's that, well, you call it self-doubt. But I'm not clear if self-doubt is the thing you see as an adversary or actually an ally. Oh, it's definitely an adversary. And I would say that imposter syndrome, they all fall in my mind under the heading of resistance with a capital R. But self-doubt is one of the

You know, resistance is fear, basically. But self-doubt is a big part of that. I'll go farther than that. I have my own theory about self-doubt, which is that I realize myself. Is this okay? We're talking about good stuff here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. When I start any kind of project, a novel, let's say, or any kind of writing project, for the first nine months, I am wracked with self-doubt.

Is this a good idea? Is anybody going to give a shit about it? Am I doing it right? Am I good enough to do this? In fact, again, self-doubt is resistance. And I would say that if I'm not feeling self-doubt, something's wrong.

So I think self-doubt is good in the sense that it's the shadow of the tree. - So it's the proof that the tree is there. - It's the proof that the tree is, exactly. - Wow. - Exactly. It's like, if you can say to yourself, I'm scared shitless of doing this thing,

then, you know, this thing is important. It's good. If it was just some little idea, you'd just have a little tiny shadow, you know? But if you had a big shadow that paralyzes you, then, you know, it's a big dream and you've got to do it. You've got a tiger by the tail. And you've got to do it. If you don't do it,

Bad things happen. So self-doubt is good in that sense. But of course, it's crippling as you're dealing with it. So for me, I just have to tell myself, OK, I hear that self-doubt. I just dismiss it. You know, I take it as a good sign.

But in my opinion, you cannot listen to that voice in your head. You think it's you that's telling you, Mike, this new idea for a movie you have, you know, you are the last guy in the world that can pull this off. You haven't got the experience. You're kind of a bum. You've been drinking way too much. You know, those words are... Do you live in my head? He's reading the mail. That is a great sign. But all you can do with that is not listen to it. No, it's not you.

It's not your voice. It's not you or me objectively assessing a situation. It's this force of nature called resistance with a capital R that's trying to stop you from achieving your dream when the force must be dismissed. Hmm. Super interesting and actually very interesting.

Very spiritual. There's some Eastern thought in that. Yeah. You know, as I understand it. What's the unpronounceable book that starts with a B? The Bhagavad Gita? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that thing. But also, my rabbi, Rabbi Mordecai Finley, he has told me, half Irish, half Jewish. Of course.

Marine, former Marine, that he showed me where this is in Genesis, where at the point that Noah, that God decides to send the flood, when he decides that he regrets that he created the human race and says, you know, I've got to wipe them out. There's a phrase, you know, in Aramaic or whatever it is. I think in English it's something like that. The human race that all their thoughts are turning always to evil.

You know, I'm sorry I made them. And according to Rabbi Finley, whatever that phrase is, I don't know what it is, is what I would call resistance. That negative thing that wants to stop us from achieving anything positive and moving to any kind of higher level. Christians would call it the enemy or the devil. The devil. I call it the devil. It is the devil. Yeah. Yeah. Get thee behind me, Satan. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

So interesting. I mean, I'm thinking of it in terms of, back to the metaphor, it's all external. Like what you're talking about is like a real tangible thing that exists outside of you. Yes. That's trying, affirmatively trying to keep you. It may exist inside you, but it exists like gravity exists.

You know, objectively, it's not like the devil in the sense of being, you know, evil, evil, evil, but it's like gravity in that you can never get away from it. You know, you wake up in the morning and there it is. And, you know, if you hold out a pen, it's going to fall. You have to constantly push against it. Yeah, constantly. Because the devil, I mean, sure. We're getting deep here. Well, let's just assume the devil's evil. We can agree on that. But he's not wearing, you know, the red outfit with the horns and the tail. Right.

Or he's not snidely whiplash, twirling his mustache, laughing maniacally. He's reasonable.

And he's diabolically camouflaged himself as the voice in your head. You think it's you saying it. It's really, well, how devilish is that? If it was coming from some other person, whether it was Snively Whiplash, it would be easy to dismiss. But when we hear that voice, or even if it's just, well, let's be distracted. Let's go to the beach. Let's have some chicken. Yeah. Well.

Yeah, whatever. Man's got to eat, you know? Yeah, let's take a walk. You know what? I'll get to the writing, but I'm going to watch the last episode of whatever it is on Netflix just because I've come this far. Let me get that, and then I'll do it, and then I'll do it.

But so procrastination. Exactly. And it's so subtle and so nuanced. And resistance is so great at using even legitimate things like your daughter has a soccer game. You know, oh, well, I've got to go to that. That's not just legitimate, reasonable. You know, Gary Sinise calls up and he wants you to show up at an event. How are you going to say no to that?

You friends with Gary? No, but I just know him through Scott Mann. I know of him through Scott Mann. Let me tell you something about Scott Mann. That son of a bitch is hard to say no to also. You know what he got? He got me to write a foreword for his book. No, no, Mike. He got you to write a blurb plus. A blurb.

Yeah. I wrote a blurb, too. But you can't say no to Scott. I wrote a 2,000-word blurb. He's doing such good stuff. How long was your blurb? Yeah, we'll write that long. Yeah. You wrote two sentences. No, he literally sat right here, right after we had an amazing conversation. This is such a Green Beret move. This is such a Green Beret move. But he's like, hey, man, I hate to ask you, but I think the world of you, and if you could write a foreword for the book, the book we'd been discussing for an hour. I said, you know what? I'd be honored. And then he left, and

And he called Chuck, and I realized, he needs this thing in like three weeks. And I've got a year's worth of work to do in the next three weeks. Like the last thing, I'm not going to write. So I call him back, and it's like, hey, man, what about a blurb? And he was like, yeah, blurb would be fine. Could you say this? I said, sure. And then maybe, could you say this too? I said, yeah, yeah, probably. And then it became readily apparent that Scott Mann doesn't know what a blurb is. So he said,

Think of it like a blurb. Honestly, I sat down to do it and like two hours later,

I had a pretty decent forward. So is he clever? Am I weak? Did I overcome resistance, right? Or did he just manipulate me like the manipulative retired Green Beret is? Maybe a little bit of all that stuff. But back, like what we were talking about, you have to sell, you have to market stuff, you know? Yes. Scott knows you have to get the word out, you know? So...

If he has a friend, Mike Rowe, who has a following, that's a great thing to do. How do you know him? I know him through another friend, another Green Beret named Jim Gant. I don't know if you know him. A book was written about him called American Spartan. He's an extremely colorful dude.

And Scott was a great supporter of him when he was in trouble. So I have the utmost respect for Scott that way. He is obviously a stand-up guy. Since you mentioned Sparta, I guess we ought to at least talk about... Gates of Fire? Thermopylae. So you do have notes. Well, I don't really refer to them. I can't read them. I'm trying to get the order right.

I don't have it here, but that was early, right? Yeah, that was early. Like 1998 or something. Second book. So did that have anything to do with the 300, the movie? No. But the two of them were on parallel tracks. Yeah.

The book material. Can I ask you about this? Like, isn't that something that happens that talk about the great muse or whatever that, you know, you have two movies about Columbus at the same time. You have two movies about the mafia at the same time. You have this great book about Thermopylae. And then you also have a movie called 300 about the same events, but they're happening irrespective of one another. But yet, you know, this, I'm trying to think of, uh,

The movie 300 comes from a graphic novel. Yeah. I'm forgetting the author's name. He's a famous guy. But although it was the same subject as Gates of Fire, they were completely different. So who knows? The muse is giving it to different people at the same time. I think it was Herodotus. Herodotus. The great... Yeah. Wasn't that the great historian? Yeah, Herodotus. Herodotus, yeah. Yeah, I think they call it the hive mentality. That's it. That's exactly it. The hive mentality, yes. Yeah, I mean...

I don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I think there was a chronology. I think you wrote that first. And then I think it's been Herodotus, right? He wrote about it. He probably wrote it first before Stephen. That story's been around a long time. It's been around a long time, yeah. See, I'm suspicious of that because there's so many, as Hunter Thompson said, the entertainment business is a...

a long plastic hallway where a cruel money trench where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. Right. So all the ideas are being stolen and they're being stolen very, very quickly. But I do think, I mean, I've seen the hive mentality in,

working like Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. Oh, I don't know either of them. Well, they shared a Nobel Prize once upon a time because Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and Kirby or Kilby, I think it was Kilby, who was basically in Texas at the time, each developed the integrated circuit.

It's basically the microchip. And they did it in different ways, but they got to the same thing, right? That is amazing, isn't it? It's incredible. It's incredible. This is back in the late 40s. And so there was this sense of,

that we were fumbling toward something big. Ah, yeah. Right? It's part creative, for sure, and it's part transactional. It's part missionary. It's part mercenary. It's a lot happening contemporaneously. So, yeah. There are vibrations out there in the ether that...

different people can tap into. Well, this is a little airy-fairy, hippy-dippy stuff, right? But it's real. That's what's real. I don't know. Take my word for it. Look, who am I to doubt you with all of your experience? Thank you. But look, the only thing that I've ever heard that I think is universally true is

is that, I want to say it right, if I, in terms of advice, I've never heard any advice that's so good that it applies to everyone. Have you had anything that's close to that? Sure. Like when a horseshoe's coming at your head and somebody yells duck, right? Excellent advice. I mean, I think platitudes and bromides are,

I think we're surrounded with them. We get a lot of them, that's for sure. I think we're surrounded with self-help books. A lot of people have the secret to happiness or money or all sorts of different things. Back to my mom for a moment and to you, if I may be so bold. I struggle sometimes with the difference between encouraging someone and enabling someone. So as a man who so many people look to,

and I don't want to overstate it, but I've listened to you on Rick Rubin. I've listened to you on Rick Roll. I mean, in the writing world, you have become a source of just unimpeachable enlightenment to so many people. But do you ever worry that the things you're saying...

might not be the thing the listener needs to hear at that particular time in whatever journey, whatever long distance route they're traversing, whatever thing they're carrying, right? Do you worry about that? Well, I'm not dishing out sugar.

When I ever give any kind of advice, right, all I'm really saying, kind of like Dirty Jobs, is this is hard and you better be ready for it, you know? So that's true. Anything that you aspire to that's on any level is going to be hard. So I'm trying to sort of kick people in the ass a little bit and tell them that, you know, better gear up for...

War because that's what it is. So I'm not making any promises of you know, this is the secret, you know Send in 49 95 and you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that it's not about the money It's about I'm thinking of some friends we have mm-hmm who have been in this business 30 years, right and maybe they're on the hero's journey and

Or maybe it's Quixote. Uh-huh. Yeah. Maybe they're on the hero's journey. Or both. Or maybe it's both. Or maybe it's Sisyphus. I mean, we can get into the Stoics and all of that, which I'd love to. But I don't know what to say to somebody who's been making little rocks out of big rocks for 30 years.

What's my job? I got lucky. Well, I don't know if it's all luck, but I'm wherever I am, and people ask me sometimes for advice. And honestly, Stephen, I don't know what the hell to tell them. Because if I say the wrong thing, I think some people need encouragement when they need it. And other people need to get a different ruck, or drive a different truck, or maybe deliver something other than cheese, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, my blog...

I have like, it's called Writing Wednesdays, right? Every Wednesday I do like a little, another chapter from the War of Art. And most of the people that follow that blog are aspiring writers or artists, or they actually are writers that are published and been published before. And I always, always am encouraging. I will never say anything negative. And I think...

Most of the people that communicate with me via that recognize, even if they have had no success and they've been doing it for 40 years, they have other jobs, obviously. They recognize that this is, I don't want to say it's something on the side, but that they may never achieve mainstream success. But that doesn't really...

the great stuff that can come out of it. You know, I'm a believer that a practice in any of the arts or any crafts or anything like that is a means of salvation. And whether we achieve mainstream success or not,

fighting that war, that's a good war. That's against the right enemy. It's against ourselves, you know. I never will read anything for anybody in the sense of giving criticism because the only thing I'm ever going to say is something encouraging because I hate it when people give me negative stuff, you know. And so that means I'm not a very good reader for anybody because I'm only going to tell them, keep going, keep going, keep going.

This is exactly like my mom. I should be dating you tomorrow night. Honestly, you know what? I'll put you in touch with my dad. You guys can work it out. Well, I was going to say that I think you do have something that sort of fits all occasions, like the advice that fits anybody, no matter where you are, and that is your mantras for young writers, which is talent is bullshit, work is everything, right? Yeah.

I believe that completely. I mean, if you are full of talent, it still works because it puts your talent in check. It says it doesn't matter if you're talented. You still have to put the work in. And if you're not talented, you've got to work even harder. At least as a writer. None of us is going to be Michael Jordan. Yeah, exactly. Well, everything to a degree. I mean, you...

Surely you need some level of requisite talent. Yeah, in anything, right? Obviously. Some baseline. Yeah. Right? Like you're not going to be, well, a world-class opera singer or a prima ballerina, right? Yeah. If you're, I don't know, short, thick-boned, no arches. I mean, right? So that's really what I'm saying. How do you know, because you never offer a discouraging word,

I guess that makes a certain amount of sense, you know, because when I press my mom on this, she said, Michael, she's into metaphors too, right? And she's not a war military, but she says, Michael, you know those marathons, people who run them and they run them and they get toward the end and they're so tired and some of them are just dehydrated and others are pooping their pants and they can barely put one foot in the other. I'm a spectator holding out a

a glass of cool water that's what my books are you know but she's also a marathon runner she stayed 60 years for 60 years but i can tell you in terms of uh

If we had everything that I'd written since I was like 22 and it started over there, that would be dog shit. But finally, 45, 50 years later, it reaches a certain level where at least it's readable. So I don't want to discourage anybody that's over there because if they keep working and if they have a modicum of talent, then you can get better and you do get better.

But whatever the matter of degree might be, you're always going to say your work ethic, your capacity to process delayed gratification, your curiosity, those things are in your control. Your talent's not.

Yes, true. Exactly. Yeah. You got whatever talent you got. Yeah. But these other things, these other tools, is there a hierarchy for those in your mind? I never thought about that. Is there one thing, one virtue that rises above the others? I mean, this goes back to dirty jobs. I mean, to me, work. That was sort of the breakthrough for me, just the idea that if I just keep working,

at least as a writer, right? It's not like being an athlete where you hit 33 and the ball game's over, you know? If you just keep working, all good things come out of that, you know? Self-discipline, self-belief, the ability to weather adversity. If you just keep putting one foot in front of the other...

That's the answer, if you ask me. And I really think God put us on this planet, kicked us out of, you know, the Garden of Eden. Henceforth shalt thou eat thy bread in the sweat of thy face, you know, for dust thou art. Right? He was really saying, you assholes are going to have to work for it. I've been giving it to you all along, but you now ate that fruit when I told you not to.

So from now on, you're going to have to work. And I think that's where we are. There is a new King James version. I don't know if you've seen this, but that exact phrase is in there. Really? You assholes. I've had it up to here. That would be so odd. It's all in red, right? It's all the red letters. Yeah.

Where are you spiritually? You've mentioned a couple of different things. I mean, the muse is not in the Bible. You just quoted the Bible. That other thing that starts with a B that I can't pronounce seems to inform a lot of what you do. The Bhagavad Gita, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things, if you're a writer or if you're in any kind of creative pursuit, at some point you have to kind of ask yourself, where do ideas come from? Like we're talking about Tom Waits driving on the freeway and a song comes to him or whatever. Yeah.

So you have to ask yourself, you know, where does that come from? Because particularly, like when I used to work in advertising, I would be trying so hard, you know, to get a new line for gravy train dog food, you know, and I just couldn't do it, right? And so there's certainly, you realize that trying hard doesn't work, right? I mean, work works, but trying so hard, that what does work is some form of surrender, right, of...

letting go and then comes in, you're in the shower, you're on the freeway, somewhere where you're not thinking anymore and something comes to you. So I'm definitely a believer that there are other dimensions of reality out there and that they seem to be positive. You sort of learn, or at least I have learned that, well, I'll tell you another story here.

When I was first trying to finish a book for the first time, I had a friend named Paul Rink who was kind of a... He lived in a camper down the road from me. I guess it's in Government Cheese. Yeah. That's what I hear, Mark. This guy. What a piece of work he is. Yeah. He really was a great mentor to me. Yeah. And one of the things he did for me was he introduced me to...

the invocation of the muse from the Odyssey, from the start of the Odyssey by Homer. And he typed it out for me on his Remington manual typewriter, which I, and, but the whole idea that as Homer sat down to compose the Odyssey or the Iliad, the first thing he did was ask the goddess,

to speak through him and basically saying, I'm not going to tell this story because who am I? But please, goddess, speak through me. So that's my religion right there. Sustained for me the song of the various-minded man who after he had plundered

The innermost citadel of hallowed Troy was made to stay grievously about the coast of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart through all the seafaring ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. So that's it. That's the invocation. So this guy, this guy, Paul Rink, is dragging you into the present by way of the ancient past. Yeah, yeah.

So he introduced me to that whole sort of concept, which immediately rang bells for me. And nothing has taken me off that concept in all the intervening years. You know, that there is another level and we are trying to reach that level. Talk about pulling the pin. Ah, yeah.

Context or just in general? Well, because that turn of phrase is in that chapter. I think maybe in the literal context, what it actually means out there in the wide world of work, but also what it means in terms of... This is another thing that goes to dirty jobs. Absolutely. I'm biased. And also goes to the whole work ethic. When I was trying to finish the first book that I ever finished...

I had to stop midway because I ran out of money and I wound up picking fruit in Washington State. And the people that worked in the bunkhouses there with me, a lot of them were fruit tramps that rode the rail still in those days. And they had a phrase called pulling the pin. Pulling the pin came from when one railway car needs to be uncoupled from another, the trainman would pull a pin out of the cup. So pulling the pin meant, in their analogy, quitting.

So it was a long season, like an eight-week season. And you would wake up in the morning and so-and-so would be, his bunk would be empty. You'd say, you know, whatever happened to Mike? He'd say, oh, he pulled the pin. So he bolted, right? So at this point, I was trying to finish...

this book and I was working against my own tendency to self-sabotage that am I going to pull the pin on finishing so that concept and there also was another friend that I met there who was a great mentor to me too so I would just say to him I'm not going to pull the pin on this book no matter what you know and I think that uh

That's another great thing of work is one thing, but you also got to finish. You know, you got to take it across the goal line. And resistance is always at its strongest right before the end. Yeah. Right. So pulling the pin was a sort of a metaphor for me of like, you know, I'm not going to quit. You know, I'm going to see it through to the end.

have you thought about it in terms of its military application uh you mean like a grenade exactly like a grenade i have not no i know but i guess that's just well there it is you pull the pin and then you throw i guess i don't know yeah well i mean you pull the pin and you can still hang on to it right it's not going to blow up until you let it go right yeah so the idea of pulling a pin where i thought you were going with it was okay that's when you're committed

Right? It's not just the tip. That's a good one, too. You pull the pin. Now maybe you hang on to it for a couple minutes. But you're not going to put the pin back in. You have activated the muse. You have activated the idea. I never thought about that. Well, you know what? As long as I'm bouncing stuff off you, you've never thought of. What about this? What if resistance is the muse? I never thought about that either.

Well, think about it. How would that play out? Well, wherever there's comfort, there's pain. Wherever there's a tree, there's a shadow. Unless, of course, your metaphor is happening at night, in which case there are no shadows. But assuming we're in the day and the sun is up and the tree is there and the shadow exists, you have these two things. But your rap on it has been, the shadow is...

It's sort of a negative thing. It's embodying this self-doubt and this sort of resistance, but it's also the proof that the tree is there. I guess what I'm saying is without the pain, without the self-doubt, without the difficulty of the task at hand, what's the point? What's the point of being brave? Where's the virtue and courage if you're not scared shitless?

If you don't overcome the thing. That's pretty good. So that's two sides of the same coin, really, right? So resistance, it really is like in a story, you have to have a villain. Yeah. Or there's no story, right? Oh, yeah. You have to have a hero and you have to have a villain. So they do go together. There's no way to have one without the other. So I would say they're connected, definitely connected. Greatest villain, or not the greatest, but your favorite character.

Yeah. In what? Well, I mean, in all of it. Like, I was having this conversation with somebody the other day about Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. And we were actually talking about the musical, which was a pretty fair adaptation of the book. My feeling was that's not really a story about Jean Valjean.

It's really a story about Javert. It's really a story about it. I mean, he is resistance. He's certainty. He's the stars. And without him...

It's a sappy, bull crappy, one dimensional, empty, boring dream. Right? Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is where are we without the villains? Where are we without resistance? And what's the point of work ethic if it's not hard? Well, I would agree with you completely. It's like, where are we without gravity? I think this sphere that we live in, that's what it's about. It's a sphere of adversity, beautiful as it is.

Right? We're all going to die. You know, if we're in the wild, we have to kill something else every day and eat it. I mean, what a world is that? Who invented that world? I feel what Rabbi Finley has to say about that. And that's why what's interesting to me is that between the two is work. It's not genius. It's not talent. It's work. It goes back to God kicking us out of the Garden of Eden, you know, and saying, you know, you've got to grind from now on.

Why do you reckon he put us there in the first place? That's a great question. I mean, is it a metaphor for like when we were apes and we could just pluck fruit out of the trees? I don't know. The big brain? I don't know. It's a great question. Well, the brain is a thing that I wonder sometimes. I've read different things about it, but the actual percentage of it that we...

Affirmatively use seems to be fairly small. That's what I've always heard. I don't know what that means I don't know either but if you're talking about 60 or 70 percent of all that gray matter being largely the The undiscovered country. I just wonder can the resistance live in there is the muse in there? Or is it truly as you suggest? Outside of us. It's a great question. I

How come whenever nobody has an answer, they tell me it's a great question? So Government Cheese is out now. Yeah, it's been out for a couple of years, yeah. Oh, the 36 titles is coming? Or is that out too? Oh yeah, that's coming. That's in a couple of years. That's coming. But the book that Chuck has over there... The Daily Press Field. The Daily Press Field is the one that's out right now. This is the thing. You...

you probably don't know it, but you sent me this and that's, yeah, I do know. I said, yeah, well it was so big and intimidating and then I opened it up and I'm like, Oh, that's good size. I can handle this. Look, it's got illustrations. What's going on here?

in week 14. Oh, that's kind of a metaphor. That's me in my little Chevy van and that's God. I'm running away from him and he's saying, you better stop and start writing, you know? And that's what that is. Vic, you are a great illustrator who did this 52, you know, one a week. Um,

He really was challenged to pull an idea out and then illustrate it. And he did a great job. And this book comes within the collection? Or can you get it just like that? Or does it come when you send it to us? You can get it just like that from Amazon. But we, like my girlfriend Diana and I, our garage is full of

boxes of this, this books. And if you order from the website, you get that big package. You got the little companion journal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Did you have a chance by any chance to look at the sweat pledge that my foundation uses? Just a little bit here, but I didn't read the whole thing. Tell me about it. What is the sweat pledge?

Sounds like something I believe in 100%. Well, I mean, it's something I believe in a lot. Again, I'm hesitant to say that it's universally applicable. For me, we award work ethic scholarships through the MicroWorks Foundation. And we do that because I believe, as you do, that there's a long list of things that are out of our control, including talent,

eye color, blood type, luck, fortune, so many things. But work ethic is not, and gratitude is not. These are conscious choices. Patience, conscious choice. Curiosity, conscious choice. A willingness to assume risk.

A very Stoic philosophy you're articulating. Well, right. So I am a fan of the Stoics and I was trying, look, I live in a, where I exist and work in television, which we didn't even talk about it, but you know what? I'm not going to answer your question because this isn't about me. The question to you is why would anybody want to be a screenwriter? Why would anybody want to be a screenwriter?

You want my real answer? I do. I mean, I love movies. So to have a part in movies, you know, to be able to actually come up with an idea for a movie and see it on the screen working...

That's a great thing. I've never experienced it, but that's a great dream. I did one time. I wrote something with a partner, and it got produced. It's called Someone is Watching with Margot Kidder and Stephanie Powers. Well, the question, Chuck, is was anybody watching? I don't know. It debuted on Lifetime and has been all over. Well, I'm asking you because your first big credit was...

Legend of Bagger Vance. As the writer of the book, not as a screenwriter. Right. But my question... They fired me. Is that true? Yeah, man. I mean, that's why... I can't think of anything less satisfying. I wrote a book once. I'm supposed to write another one. I found it difficult and challenging and fun and rewarding and all those things. But a screenwriter...

A screenwriter is at the bottom of the totem pole creatively, as I understand. It's a tough gig. It's a heartbreaking gig. It's the worst. Because they replace you, and then they replace the person that replaced you, and then da-da-da-da-da. And I've certainly had movies made where I went to the screening, and I didn't even recognize it was so different. But the dream...

Of writing, you know, something that actually gets made and is good, that's a great thing. I mean, I watch movies, I go, oh man, I wish I had written that. Plus it's a fun medium, you know, because you only have what the camera shows you, right? You can't go inside the actor's head. Everything's external. And you've got, the great thing you've got is subtext. And you've got the actor's expressions so that there can be

with a real minimum, without words, you can have really powerful stuff going on, you know? So it's a great medium. It's fun. I definitely think writing screenplays is fun. I wouldn't do it again for the same reasons you're talking about, Mike, because it's just a heartbreaking thing. You get fired and, you know, and then they cheat you and all that sort of stuff. I would direct. I would write and direct.

I wouldn't do that, but I would take my hat off to you for doing it. It's hard work. It's not a wish fulfillment, but at least you could... You can control it a little bit. You can control the script. A little bit until the final cut gets taken away from you. All right, so let me take that back. I would write, direct, and own the studio. Okay. And all the theaters. Right, everything. I'll say this. I mean, I had like a 10-year career as a screenwriter. Whatever I know, 90% of what I know about the craft...

I learned there, just being in the trenches. So you do learn how to tell a certain kind of story. You know, you just have to. So it was a great school for me. But you left. I left because I wanted to write a book, you know. There's another Muse story where the idea for The Legend of Bagger Vance came to me like that after like a 10-year career in screenwriting. But it came as a book and not as a movie.

And so when I told my agent that, he basically fired me. I've told this story many times. But then the book became a movie, which is another crazy thing, you know? And that, once I had written one book, then I didn't want to go back. Yeah. Is the War of Art the seminal thing now? I mean, is that what you're best known for? Probably I'm not best known for, but actually Gates of Fire sold more copies than the War of Art. What's your favorite?

Gates of Fire. So this idea that sometimes you're trying to please a publisher because you owe them a book. Sometimes you're trying to please a studio because they're the studio and whatever. Who do you look to...

primarily. Like Stephen King refers to something called, I think he calls them constant reader. It's the metaphor or the amalgam, right? For the person he's always writing to. Is there such a... No. I've heard of that thing. You know, you have an avatar of a reader or whatever it is. But also, fortunately, I'm old enough now that...

I'm never going to put myself in a position of writing for a studio or for anything like that, you know, because life is way, way too short because it's a losing game, you know, it's a losing game. And fortunately, you know, my girlfriend and I have this little publishing company that brought these books out. So if nobody wants to publish anything, I'll publish it myself, you know, and I don't really care if it doesn't find a market because nobody finds a market anyway.

But no, I don't write for anybody specifically. Like I say, I believe in the muse. The muse gives you me an assignment and I just try to do that assignment the best I can, you know, because the assignment or a story is sort of exists already. Right. And you're trying to excavate it.

like excavating a dinosaur that you found. Or knocking the marble off that doesn't belong to get to, you know, David. Yeah, exactly. So that's all I'm trying to do. And I'm not trying to do it for any specific reader myself. I want to read it. You know, I want to read it and like it. Steve, how important is your calendar? How important is scheduling writing?

Not too important, at least to me right now. You mean like deadlines and stuff? No, no. I mean like the muse speaks to you and gives you an idea, gives you those two sentences to start a novel. Do you block out time on your schedule to say, well, I'm going to write from here to here and there to there? I'm going to start and I'm going to go until I'm done. Sometimes...

You go really fast, and sometimes you don't go so fast. I try to do one thing at a time, and I'm just being true to it and taking as long as it takes to do it. I mean, I think the better question is how much time passed between those two sentences that you knew were going to start a book that you could not describe beyond that. Like, how long did it take for you? It's usually two or three years for me. Wow.

And by the way, that book, speaking of your sweat pledge, the book is called The Virtues of War. And it's really just the things you were just reeling off. I have Alexander citing those same thing, the willing embrace of adversity, patience, selflessness, all the things that you say we can control.

And those are the virtues of a warrior, at least in my Alexander's head. And I think they're also the virtues of a writer or an artist. Those exact same things, right? Patience, perseverance, courage, the willing embrace of adversity, the ability to endure setbacks, et cetera, et cetera. The things we can control. So I'm with your sweat pledge completely. Well, thanks.

If there was a single thing that you would consider the most formative in your youth, could you identify it? Probably it was the truck driving stuff that's in, I don't know if you call that my youth. I was like 29 years old or something like that. Yeah, you were still young. The things you carried. Yeah, yeah. What's the plan then? Just keep writing? Just keep working? Yeah, until they take me out. Yeah, I can't imagine. I'm quite sure that if I ever stopped, I would just kind of go downhill. Yeah.

Like, you know, in a hurry. So yeah, as long as the goddess has given me an assignment, I'll keep trying to do it. Well, plus you got a garage full of books. Yeah. It's shrinking. It's coming down. Then they're going to sell themselves. Little by little, yeah. Your website is legendary among writers and people can go there and see your daily blog. Yes. Where exactly? It's just my name, Steven Pressfield, with a V.

With a V. Steven with a V. Steven with a V. Stevenpressfield.com. All right. Well, you go there and you'll learn everything else you need to know about the guy. Pick up Government Cheese. It is a memoir. I know that because it says so right on the cover. Everything else is just amazing. The War of Art should be on your shelf if it's not for so many reasons. How many people have told you that it's benefited them completely outside the world of writing? A lot. A lot.

I think it's a survival guide of sorts. Yeah. I think it's a truth that applies across the board, you know? Yeah. And whatever, like we say, work is the thing, you know?

So, Mike, thank you for having me on here. This has been fun. Thanks for coming by. And asking these questions I don't know what the answer to them are. This is great. Thank you, Chuck. Thanks for organizing. You got to fix that buzzer downstairs, you know? Yeah, yeah. We do need to work on it. Do we have a buzzer problem now? Yeah, there's a buzzer problem. You know what, man? There's always something, Steve. Yeah. If it's not a buzzer, it's an ambulance. Yeah, right. There always is some shit. Yeah.

You're terrific, man. I appreciate the time. Thank you. I hope we can do it again sometime. Well, we're expecting you back tomorrow. Let five years pass and we'll do it again. All right. Five years it is. Back to Malibu with you. All right. Okay. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. Tell us who you are. And before you go, won't you leave? Stop. I'm lousy.

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